There has been a lot of anticipation around Ubisoft Montréal’s new game, and for good reason too. We’ve all seen the trailers and watched as much footage as has been made available, and the game certainly looks incredible. There is one excellently planted plot behind Assassin’s Creed, and although I’m not going to give much away about the game's story, however, I need to touch on something that is present from the very beginning of the game.
From the off set of the game, and has been seen in the trailers with guards and other targets having strange blue glowing numbers around them, it is obvious that all is not as it seems. You are Desmond Miles and you are set in today’s times, Altair the deadly assassin that you play as for the most part, is Desmond’s ancestor. Some company have basically kidnapped Desmond and are holding him prisoner to use on a machine they call the “Animus”, this advanced piece of hardware and software can be confused with a time machine, this is not what it is though. The Animus works in such a way to scan Desmond’s brain, as it is believed that memories are passed down from generation to generation; the Animus helps to remember such things and works in a way as to put Desmond back in a situation that he vaguely has little recollection of. Essentially it puts Desmond back in time to the 12th Century during the Third Crusade, or as it was based on Altair’s memories. As you play through these events, this helps to remember more as you progress through the game’s memories or levels as we may better know them.

With one intriguing and well thought out plot, Assassin’s Creed proves to be one killer of a game but is far from perfect, there are some things that bother me, and some of the things which I think were executed flawlessly.

Gameplay:

The main problem is with the guards A.I., this becomes ever more apparent during combat; Altair can literally be surrounded by more than a dozen guards at any one time. Unfortunately they like to take it in turns trying to attack you and there’s usually a large gap between each attack, causing the combat to just look well quite stupid. This makes it incredibly easy to defeat them, because they don’t attack erratically together, so this makes it all the more easy for you as Altair to counter their attacks one after the other and finish them each with an impressive instant killing and bloody counter attack. The combat is fairly good; the problem just lies with your enemies not putting up a challenge. After a while of this, I jumped into options to check for a difficulty select to see if there was a more challenging mode present, sadly there is not. The fundamentals overall are present here, and easily the most noticeably impressive thing about the game is in the animation of Altair’s movements. These happen so fluently with no cut-offs or moments of clipping between moves – essentially it all looks like one big move with no interruptions in the animation. Say for example, sprinting down an alley way, charging up the wall, jumping from a rail to grab some bricks sticking out on the side of a building, leaping up to a window sill climbing onto a pole on the roof (eagle view) and leaping off in spectacular fashion to land in a barrel of hay. All of that can happen naturally without any noticeable interruptions between movements. That is impressive and life like to the extent I have not seen anything come so close to actual life like movements in any video game before.

There are moments where Desmond comes out of the Animus for a break, and there is some light gameplay to be had here, though unfortunately it is not such a smooth experiencing as being strapped into the Animus and playing as Altair; it feels like a very different game altogether. The gameplay here seems very clunky as you attempt to move Desmond around the area investigating and talking with your captors.

Most loading screens are hidden within a room similar to that from The Matrix movies; here Altair can still be controlled. Basically it’s a clever concept to hide loading screens and any loading screen that you do encounter, well that’s not the game loading, that’s just the Animus. Desmond is in today’s times and very real after-all. During these moments of the Animus loading you get to hear the screechy robotic voice of the Animus, who gives Desmond tips on how to control Altair. This voice actually sounds similar to the one which gamers may be familiar with from another game, Portal (The Orange Box); perhaps the voice of the Animus is the older sister from the one seen in Portal?
This clearly is an excellent design decision as it attempts to bend the reality between games and real life that bit further, even if the time spent outside the Animus feels more false and game like compared to that of when being in the Animus playing as Altair. One thing all gamers hate are moments where you play a game and you find some invisible wall that you can’t get past. Well these are ever more apparent in Assassin’s Creed, but they’re not an annoyance because it doesn’t break the trend of being an assassin during Third Crusade at all, simply because you’re in the Animus and do not yet have recollection of that specific area which is blocked by a blue barrier. It’s certainly amusing to see and just generally made me think, this and Altair’s movements within the Animus is absolutely incredible.

During your time with Assassin’s Creed you must regain abilities and weaponry back by killing your assassination targets and reporting to your master. You can visit the local Creed Bureau in each district, from there you will receive some very vague tips where you must wander around trying to find specific missions relating to your assignation target. This can become very frustrating at first and took me a while to get used to, such missions can be found easier by climbing up a tall building, just look for one with an eagle circling high above. There will be a place to stand on and Altair can then synchronize from here. This will then mark any nearby objectives on his compass and un fog the local area on the map. The problem of course is finding a high point to synchronize within the vicinity of a nearby mission of which you need to complete at least 3 of 6 missions to get the information on the whereabouts of Altair’s current assassination target.

When playing as Altair, holding down the left trigger will lock onto a nearby target that you are facing. It is useful during combat and is used to activate sub mission; again its also useful for pick-pocketing items or following an individual to a secluded area to interrogate and punch some answers out of him. Attacking a civilian, even if it’s an interrogation target can sometimes provoke other civilians to jump in on the fight too, this I found surprising and was certainly pleased with too.
Holding down the right trigger puts you into high profile mode, which means you’ll also be running about the dirty streets instead of walking. During high profile mode, the face buttons perform different actions, such as a high profile assassination and the most impressive of all is free-running. This is the nifty action that I mentioned earlier which looks so incredibly fluid and life like as you run around jumping up and climbing anywhere that Altair can possibly reach. With the right trigger released Altair will be in low profile mode, which means he can wander around without drawing too much attention to himself and without bumping into any innocent civilians or worse, annoying the guards, which is easily done when running or free-running. You can also discretely assassinate your targets in the same way as high profile, but when in low profile Altair will attract little to no attention and can calmly walk away as civilians and nearby guards notice the victim slowly tumble to the ground. Guards will cautiously search the nearby area of the victim's death, doing anything which may cause attention to yourself will result in a physical response and inevitably a chase or combat situation with nearby guards. It’s easy to defeat them all and continue but should you want to save time, it’s probably best to free-run Altair out of there and find a tent or barrel of hay to jump into, once you lose their line of sight.

You will often come across some side missions during Altair’s travels, such as rescuing civilians from overpowering guards. Killing all the guards will result in a response from the civilian and you may find that they will be very useful in assisting you when you need it. For example, rescuing a monk from the guards will result in you being able to join a group of them to get past areas where the guards would normally not allow Altair to enter. Of course there are other ways past too, by simply just killing them or running past them. Though as shown in the E3 demonstration some months ago, you can get on top of a nearby building and push an unsuspecting guard all the way down to the floor below, causing the guards to leave their guarded post and begin a search for the culprit, this gives Altair some time to get past without provoking any attention to himself.

The districts really feel alive with the amount of civilians wandering around, all of whom are interacting and having their own conversations with each other. Getting past these civilians on foot can be a problem if you are in a hurry, which is why free-running along the rooftops is a lot quicker, although there are also guards posted on some of the rooftops too. These are easily disposed of from a distance with Altair’s throwing knives, which guarantee a direct hit should you be locked on to the guard. Moving on foot is perfectly fine, even if it is much slower but not ideal if you are trying to escape pursuing guards. Altair is also able to gently push anyone out of his way without directing any attention to himself. If you have just assassinated someone and there are many guards on patrol then it’s easy for Altair to enter into blend mode, which means with his monk like clothing he basically prays and wanders around on his own without causing any attention. This seems to be one of those things where you can exploit the guards A.I. yet again though, resulting in Altair being basically invisible whilst in blend mode and can easily walk up behind any of the patrolling guards and assassinate them with ease too. This kind of spoils the effect as even other guards nearby may not even notice. So as long as you immediately enter blend mode after delivering a low profile assassination then you could essentially continue this until they’re all dead (although certain guards do respawn). The only real challenge present is some of the more mentally challenged and ill looking civilians who wander around the streets in a rage, these particular civilians can be a nuisance to you if your blending just after an assassination, as they will just blatantly push you in a rage and that stumble will alert any nearby guards that are within a line of sight of you and who are still searching for the culprit of the assassination, resulting in either another chase or combat situation.
Another reason for Altair to avoid the streets will be due to the beggars, these people if nearby will always be in your face and you’re more than welcome to push them out the way without the guards going crazy on you, they’ll just mutter a comment like “you better not do that again!”, which is certainly nice and gives you enough freedom to explore from the ground instead of the rooftops.

You even get some time riding around on horses too and are able to wield your sword and lock onto guards in the same way. Unfortunately there aren’t many large areas for you to ride a horse around in though. There is at least one good opportunity to use the horse for combat, although it feels very disjointed as you can easily just ride past all these guards with ease. Sure, you have the choice to stay on the horse and fight them, but it’s nice to feel that you actually need to kill them in the first place. Guards having horses would obviously carry the transition of the chasing on foot onto horses too, which would result in not being able to hide, which in turn would give a reason to actually stop and fight. What seems odd is that no guards actually ride on horses, in fact Altair seems to be the only horse rider of that time, even though there are several horses about outside of district areas. Speaking of district areas, the game is not one big map as some may have thought, basically each area has some gates on the edge of the map which you can get to on foot or in some cases by horse and then the Animus gives you a menu to choose which memory specific destination you would like Desmond as Altair to be loaded into. As I said earlier, it’s a clever ploy to mask the limitations that video games have and to be fair it is something it does extremely well too. My only real gripe with that theory is your time as Desmond when you exit the Animus, while it seems to be set in our present date, the actual gameplay mechanics and movements of Desmond just feel very clunky, he just doesn’t walk and move around very smoothly, not at least like Altair does when Desmond is in the Animus. Although some of the talking and story is delivered when you are away from Altair and back as Desmond, while it’s an excellent take on it and I really do like it, the problem is that it just feels tacked on compared to your actual time spent as Altair during the Third Crusade.

Graphics:

Cut-scenes in video games seem very dormant as of late, whether the reason for that is due to having an essentially 720p video cut-scene which takes up much more space on an Xbox 360 DL DVD game disc, than say, just using the game engine and locking the cameras perspective to the important actions on screen. Perhaps as with our now current generation of consoles, maybe full motion video cutscenes are no longer required, with the days of old on Xbox and PS2 most of the games stories were told within these FMV cut-scenes, though this is likely due to games looking pretty poor back then, at least compared to today’s standards. Whatever the reasons may be behind the way the industry has chosen this method, it’s one that certainly seems to work in favour of the gamer. I mean you essentially are still playing and can move Altair during these impressive fixed perspective gameplay cut-scenes. There’s not a great deal of these moments in the game anyway, however, when you get them it certainly is impressive as if you’ve been playing games for many years then it kind of feels like you have control, and you still do have limited control over Altair during these moments.

There are a few noticeable issues with the game's graphics, though they certainly do look impressive. Perhaps not as good as I was expecting from all the footage we had seen, but they’re really quite impressive nevertheless as there is often fog, bright rays of sun and of course the many guards and civilians as well as birds each casting their own shadows in the world, which all amounts to filling the streets convincingly of wherever Altair may be exploring. It would have been nice to have had some sort of dynamic weather system; at least a transition between day and night would have been very much welcomed. Altair tends to get some sleep before his next big assassination target and the Animus often skips the memory for Desmond to a more recent one when available, so perhaps Altair misses the darkness, although one would naturally assume that assassin’s would like to attack in the dark as well. Perhaps that would leave fewer places to hide and a smaller crowd to mix with too, so it seems it was a wise decision in the end.

Sound:

The audio overall featured within Assassin’s Creed is impressive and could have really been something special. Most of your time is spent running along rooftops and walking among mass amounts of people in large crowds, then although the voice acting is delivered very convincingly for the game's tone and theme, the disappointing thing is that it all gets repeated so much. Seeing as this is where the player will be spending their time for the majority of the game, amongst the crowds and busy market stall areas, it’s a shame to hear that things get repeated so much. Surely it couldn’t have been much more difficult to give the more vocal of characters multiple lines to say at different times, even more so with your optional mission objectives, such as saving civilians from the guards. While these do actually have a few different lines, it’s all often repeated far too much. If you go to each of the districts in the game and save at least two civilians from each one, I would be very surprised if you do not hear the same line again. The beggars are another one too, as it seems they’re almost hunting you down, and seem to always have exactly the same thing to say, though thankfully you don’t stumble across them quite as often as I had feared. Fortunately Assassin’s Creed features a very tense soundtrack, which kicks in at the right moment to ease in moments of tension and goes all out for those rather intense chase moments.

Longevity:

Like myself, I’m sure most gamers would have been caught up in the hype surrounding this title, I personally do not think it has lived up to its own hype. Whilst the game is still good and an enjoyable game to play, I did expect so much more from the experience. There is little replay value on offer, although seeing as I did have a fairly enjoyable time with the game I’m going to play it a second time and go for some of the Achievements I missed on my first play through. There are also Assassin’s flags to collect as well, although it’s nowhere near as fun as say, Crackdown and its Orb hunting.

Overall:

Assassin’s Creed is receiving a fair amount of criticism, despite some of its flaws I still believe the game to be very good, it just could have done with some more refining. Hopefully the development team at Ubisoft Montreal take all the criticism on the chin and get cracking on making Assassin’s Creed II everything it can possibly be and more, that is of course assuming they make a sequel. Personally, I’d just like to see a game update to either address the A.I. of the guards to make combat more challenging or keep it as it is and add a harder or “assassin” difficulty into the game with the refinements on the guards A.I. when in a combat situation, which should certainly make for a more challenging and hopefully more enjoyable experience, although it seems unlikely that they would add that, but you never know.